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Consider this a placeholder

I’m not quite ready for the month to get the best of me yet, but I’ve had a really long day — I’ve been up since 4:30 a.m. — and I really need a nap.

That sentence sounds less ridiculous when I remind you that the time change is tonight and soon, it will be quarter to seven, not quarter to eight — not like that’s a bad time to crawl into bed though. (And, if you were wondering, even though Lloyd is on the provincial border and Saskatchewan doesn’t do daylight savings time, the time change does not occur in the middle of the street. The boundary is actually a couple of kilometres to the east still.)

So if I get a couple of hours of sleep and can come back to this before midnight, I will. Otherwise, just consider the following as a placeholder for now.

“It’s not that I’m a perfectionist, it’s just that I care more than the average bear.” – paraphrase of a Facebook status from third-year university.

Edit: Nov. 6Sometimes, I wish I cared just as much as the average bear (read: journalist/person), not more. It would probably make my life less stressful and a little less busy.

When I’m working with InDesign, our desktop publishing program, I have about a 95 per cent chance of looking at an indent and knowing, just by looking, that it’s not set at 0.125, or looking at some copy and knowing there’s two spaces after a period, without actually doing anything.

Quite honestly, though it’s a handy trick to have when you’re copy editing, it’s kind of annoying. Because once I find one two-spaces-after-a-period in submitted copy, I have to go back and check all the other beginnings of sentences, because history has shown that if someone does it once, they probably do it every time.

It’s really come down to a battle of, who’s going to notice? And I don’t like that battle at all, one, because I’m going to notice and know I left it without checking it or fixing it, hoping no one would notice. Two, it leaves room for attitude, in that if you don’t stick to strict consistency, it leaves room for “Well, I don’t feel like double-checking that rule today. (undertone: who’s going to notice?)”

I’d asked a couple friends for arguments for and against CP Style awhile ago, and someone made the comment that it’s not even about being consistent down the page, but throughout the paper.When I saw G. in Edmonton a couple of weeks ago, he took that even further and said it’s about being consistent eight months from now.

Being consistent on a page and through a paper is doable. So is being consistent eight months from now, but like I said, at that point it really becomes a battle of who’s going to notice? (Note: my solution is to set up a doable consistency goal so that you don’t drive yourself crazy and that your soul dies from all the copy editing mistakes, but I’m still working on setting those guidelines for myself. The other option is to just memorize the entire CP book, and I guess I’m well on my way to doing that too.)

This is that whole caring more than the average bear thing, and being frustrated when people don’t even care as much as the average bear. I got a lot of flak about it in third year from someone else in the journalism program, and funny enough, though we both more or less stuck to our guns in that I was going to care more than the average bear and he wanted me to relax a little, we became sort of friends — and I might have relaxed, a little bit, though by now I might have forgotten how to do that (relax).

I’m in this funny in between place where I care more than the average bear, but I’m still far from a perfectionist. When I hear that voice from third year in my head, it helps a little bit with the frustration, but I’m still not sure.